Music preview: Uri Caine

Composer, pianist and keyboard-player Uri Caine is a seeker  - he can play "straight-ahead" and funky jazz, but he is also one of the most innovative and adventurous musicians on the modern jazz scene, and these days he is making more than a dent on the classical scene as well. Though it is only January, Uri Caine's concert with his trio at Jazz Dock promises to be among the highlights of the year.

This will not be the first time Caine has played Prague, but it will be his first show that can truly be called jazz.

"I was in Prague seven or eight years ago with a bigger group," Caine tells The Prague Post.

Though he was billed as the Uri Caine Ensemble for that concert, Caine refers to that group as an orchestra, and indeed it was an eight-member ensemble with strings and horns, but also including African-American jazz vocalist Barbara Walker and downtown New York City's finest avant-garde DJ, DJ Olive. All of this was to perform his Gustav Mahler project at St. Anne's Church as part of the Strings of Autumn Festival in 2004.

"I remember we were staying in town for a couple of days for this show, and we even visited Mahler's home out in the country," Caine says. "I live on a street in New York where Mahler lived when he was conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and so I really wanted to see where he was born."

Caine's Mahler project was an extension of his other recordings reinterpreting classical masters including Bach's The Goldberg Variations, Beethoven's Diabelli Variations and works by Schumann, Wagner and Mozart. These projects are less of an interlude from his jazz projects than the product of a creative tug-of-war, which Caine is enjoying as a composer and performer in both genres. As he explains, the idea behind these projects is to take the text, form or structure of a composition and use it as a way to suggest improvisation.

"In a way, it becomes the scaffolding for us to build an improvisation, and it forces us to try a new way, and it is also always very liberating," he says.

On the jazz side, Caine's best-known effort is the hip-hop meets funk project The Philadelphia Experiment, which included stars of his former hometown like bassist Christian McBride, and drummer Questlove of the hip-hop group The Roots. Caine's more straight-ahead meets abstract jazz recordings have included guests including Don Byron, Dave Douglas, Joshua Redman, John Zorn and Arto Lindsay. Before moving to New York City in the late '80s, he was playing with most of Philadelphia's best-known jazzmen, including Hank Mobley.

Most of Caine's recordings as a leader since the early '90s, whether classical interpretations or fierce electronica-jazz, are on the German label Winter & Winter, issued in deluxe, hardcover editions, like an artist's booklet.

"Stefan Winter is very supportive," Caine says. "There are not too many American companies who would have let me do the projects I've done - for instance, Mahler in 1996 - there is a lot of freedom to do different things," he says, while pointing out he has a lot of new music that hasn't come out, and maybe he'll end up putting some of it out himself in the future.

Regarding his current trio, which includes Jon Hebert on contrabass and Ben Perowsky on drums, Caine says, "I've been working with them for many years, with Ben since my first years in New York City - and about two to three years as this group. We'll be playing songs from the recording Siren (mostly original music) and some standard, more jazzy tunes, and try to integrate it all. We can swing, and we can also get more abstract, all very naturally - we can get in and out - and I really enjoy that!"

Caine's latest release, Siren, is a scrumptious collection of original, abstract jazz compositions, with the exception of one standard, "Green Dolphin Street." Each track allows Caine to let loose in improvisational solos, but there is a definitive originality on each effort, possibly due to the subtle influence of classical masters, as well as jazz pianists from Monk to Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner. But it's the overall finesse and nonabrasive freedom of all the players combined that make this fire burn so intensely, especially on the songs with the weirdest titles like "Smelly," "Succubus" and "Tarshish."

Since he is going to be back in Gustav Mahler's homeland, more or less, Uri Caine may also consider including an ode to one of his greatest inspirations somewhere in the set, but he's not sure, asking, with genuine concern, "Do you think it will be appropriate?"

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com